The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  2. This is likely a reference to a shorter or abridged version of the Tripitaka story, compiled by Zhu Dingchen of Canton and published in the late sixteenth century, during the reign of Wanli by a Fujian bookseller, Liu Qiumao. See the present volume’s introduction II for further discussion of the text in relation to JW.

  3. This is Shao Yong (1011–1077), a Song scholar and an expert in the Classic of Change.

  4. The Three August Ones and the Five Thearchs refer to the legendary sage rulers at the dawn of Chinese civilization. There has been no agreement on who the Three August Ones or the Five Thearchs were, and ancient Chinese texts present several varied combinations.

  5. These four continents forming the world belong to the geography of Indian Buddhism.

  6. These islets and islands were famous abodes of gods or immortals.

  7. The twenty-four solar terms are seasonal divisions of a year established in the Han. They are: lichun (Spring begins), yushui (rain water), jingzhi (excited insects), chunfen (vernal equinox), qingming (clear and bright), guyu (grain rains), lixia (summer begins), xiaoman (grain fills), mangzhong (grain in ear), xiazhi (summer solstice), xiaoshu (slight heat), dashu (great heat), liqiu (autumn begins), chushu (limit of heat), bailu (white dew) qiufen (autumnal equinox), hanlu (cold dew), shuangjiang (hoar frost descends), lidong (winter begins), xiaoxue (slight snow), daxue (great snow), dongzhi (winter solstice), xiaohan (slight cold), and dahan (great cold).

  8. A quotation of two lines of a Tang poem.

  9. “Blessed Land and Cave/Grotto Heaven,” , common Daoist metaphors to indicate their place of residence, urban or in the wilds and mountains. See ET, 1: 368–73.

  10. Confucius, Analects, 2. 22.

  11. “Loanname . . .”: literally, through a borrowed name. The term jiaming in the poem points to the important concepts of “entering the provisional (rujia )” by Zhiyi (538–597 CE) and of prañapti in Buddhism developed by Nāgājuna. Jia means to borrow, to pretend, to assume, and to hypothesize, and jiaming thus means false, provisional, or unreal names. In the Buddhist doctrine of upāya, however, unrealities can provide the very means to think about the real, because the illusory or phenomenal can reveal and teach what is true. Jiaming thus resonates with the Daoist philosophy of language and signs and their massive exploitation of symbols, tropes, and metaphors (piyu) discussed in introduction IV. See also the perceptive analysis of the novel in relations to prajñapti in Qiancheng Li’s pioneering monograph, Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber (Honolulu, 2004), pp. 35–46. Jiaming in a literary context is thus another marvelous synonym for fiction.

  12. Yellow-sperm (Polygonatum gigantum var. thumbergii): a small plant the roots of which are often used for medicinal purposes by the Chinese.

  13. According to ancient Chinese taxonomy, the five divisions of living creatures are: the winged creatures, the hairy creatures, the armored creatures, the scaly creatures, and the naked creatures (i.e., humans).

  14. The dragon’s pulse is one of the magnetic currents recognized by geomancers.

  15. The rotted ax handle (lanke) alludes to a mountain by such a name (Lankeshan) in the province of Zhejiang, south of Juzhou. According to the Shuyiji , a certain Wang Zhi () of the Jin () period went to this mountain to gather wood. Two youths whom he saw playing chess gave him a fruit to eat shaped like the pit of a nut, after which he felt no hunger at all. When at last the game was finished, one of the youths pointed to his ax and said, “Your handle has rotted!” When Wang returned to his home, a century had elapsed. There is also a chess classic in Chinese named Lanke jing; see JW, chapter 10.

  16. Double Three: sansan can mean quite a few things in Chinese. First, it can be an abbreviated term for three times three, which means the number 9, a symbol of perfection in both Buddhism and Daoism, as we will see throughout the novel. Second, it may likely allude to the Buddhist doctrine of the three samādhis (also accepted by some Quanzhen patriarchs), the meditation on three subjecsts, which are (1) kong, or emptiness, purging the mind of all ideas and illusions; (2) wuxiang, or no appearance, purging the mind of all phenomena and external forms; and (3) wuyuan, or no desire, purging the mind of all desires. The Double Three is the advanced type of meditation, which term of each is doubled (e.g., kongkong, etc.).

  17. A pun on the words “surname” and “temper,” both of which are pronounced xing, but are written with a different radical to the left of the Chinese graphs. The Patriarch asked for Monkey’s surname, but Monkey heard it as a remark about his “temper.” See further discussion in introduction IV. The dialogue here between the Patriarch Subodhi and Monkey with puns on “name” and “temper [the graph has a third important meaning of nature]” seems most likely to have been derived from a conversation between the Fourth Chan (Zen) Patriarch Daoxin (530–651) and a young boy of exceptionally attractive features whom he met while traveling to Yellow Plum County (the youth later to be canonized as the Fifth Patriarch Hongren [602–675]). “The Patriarch asked: ‘Son, what’s your name ()?’ The child replied, ‘It’s the nature () of Buddha.’ The Patriarch said, ‘So, you don’t have a name!’ The boy said, ‘It’s because my nature is empty/void ().’ Recognizing him to be a vessel of the Dharma, the Patriarch ordered his attendant to go the boy’s home to beg parental permission for the youth to leave the family [i.e., to become a Buddhist]. The parents regarded this as predestined affinity and offered no objection; they gave him up as a disciple to be named Hongren (profound forbearance).” The story is preserved in the classic of Chan genealogy, Jingde chuandeng lu (A Record of the Transmission of the Lamp in the Jingde era), compiled by the monk Daoyuan in 1004. See # 2076 in T51: 0222b.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. In Buddhism, māra has the meaning of the Destroyer, the Evil One, and the Hinderer. The Chinese term mo traditionally used to translate it also has the meaning of demon. “Primal or primordial or original spirit, yuanshen ” is a term favored by Ming alchemical texts. According to Martina Darga’s entry on “Shengtai or Holy Embryo,” “comparing the development of the embryo to the revelation of Buddhahood is typical of neidan texts of the Ming period. For instance, the XMGZ . . . uses Body of the Law (fashen , dharmakāya) as a synonym for shengtai. The birth of the embryo represents the appearance of the original spirit (yuanshen ) or Buddhahood and is understood as enlightenment.” See ET 2: 884. This understanding is consistently presumed in the text of XYJ.

  2. Possibly a reference to Buddhism here, but it is Buddhism as seen through the understanding of Ming syncretism. The three vehicles (sansheng, triyāna) are the conveyances that carry living beings across mortality to the shores of Nirvāṇa. They are generally divided into the categories of great, medium, and small.

  3. The tail of the yak or deer was adopted by the great conversationalists of antiquity as a ceremonious instrument. Used sometimes as a fly-brush or duster, it became inseparably associated with the Daoist or Buddhist recluse and served as a symbol of his purity and detachment.

  4. “Three Parties, sanjia “: see the discussion of the possible different meanings of the term in introduction IV.

  5. I have not been able to determine the meaning of the metaphor “treading the arrow,” though it may refer to some practice (possibly sexual) in physiological alchemy. Other practices, such as “taking red lead (hongqian), making autumn stone (qiushi),” mentioned by the Patriarch, echo a similar portion of XMGZ that reviews various techniques and practices of alchemists. See the chapter, “On Deviancy and Orthodoxy, Xiezheng shuo ,” in XMGZ-Taipei, pp. 55–56. “Red mercury” is the name for a virgin’s menstrual discharge, while “autumn stone” refers to the urine of a virgin boy.

  6. The period from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

  7. A symbol of perfection and a symbol for brazier in alchemy, the moon, as we have seen in the name of the Patriarch’s cave, may also refer to the heart in alchemical discourse.

  8. In this line, the moon, the rabbit, the su
n, and the crow may all refer to various parts of the viscera inside the human adept’s body.

  9. “Tortoise and snake”: an allusion to the Perfected Warrior or Zhenwu (also known as the Dark Warrior, Xuanwu), “a divinity known for his powers of healing and exorcism. In Han dynasty cosmology, the Dark Warrior was one of the four animals corresponding to the cardinal directions. . . . Usually depicted as a serpent coiled around a tortoise.” The allusion here uses the figure to symbolize the state of achieved immortality. Citation from entry in ET 2: 1266.

  10. According to the literature of internal alchemy, there are five forces in the human body that correspond to the Five Phases: jing (sperm or essence, water); shen (spirit, fire); hun (soul, wood); po (vigor, metal or gold); yi (intent or will, earth). If the forces are allowed to follow their natural course, then the fluids become blood, and the blood becomes vital discharges (sperm, menstruation, vaginal fluids, and saliva) which may flow out of the body. The advocacy of reversing the five forces aims at retaining them within the body, and eventually, reversing their flow with the help of harnassing the body’s pneumatic vitality (qi), so as to prevent decline and decay.

  11. The period from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

  12. “Nine apertures”: eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, and urinal and anal passages.

  13. Oxen made of cast iron were placed in streams or fields; farmers used them as a charm to prevent floods.

  14. “Eight epochs”: the first days of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the two equinoxes, and the solstices.

  15. “Three Regions”: the Buddhist division of the world into the three realms of desire, form, and pure spirit. Hence the term frequently means the world or the universe.

  16. “Five Phases”: wuxing ; they are metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. For the precise meaning of the term, Five Evolutive Phases, see Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence (Cambridge), 1974), pp. 43–54.

  17. An inconsistency in the text.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. “Ten species”: the five kinds of beings (ecclesiastical, earthly, human, divine, and demonic) and the five divisions of living creatures (see chapter 1, note 13). The Hell of Ninefold Darkness (jiuyou ) is a Daoist hell.

  2. A yakṣa is generally thought of in Indian religions as a demon in the earth, the air, or the lower heavens. They can be violent and malignant, but in this novel, they seem to be associated much more with the oceans.

  3. Heavenly River is the Chinese name for the Milky Way.

  4. The Great Yu was the putative founder of the Xia dynasty (ca. 2205 BCE) and the mythic conqueror of the Flood in China.

  5. The accepted understanding in Chinese historical culture is that the transcendence of the Five Phases (i.e., to be beyond the control of their dynamics) is to have attained de facto the state of immortality.

  6. For the translation of these ten kings, I follow Arthur Waley. See his discussion in A Catalogue of Paintings Recovered from Tun-Huang by Sir Aurel Stein (London, 1931), pp. xxvi–xxx. For more recent scholarship, see Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu, 1994).

  7. The identity of this divinity, , is intriguing, as he appears quite often in the entire novel—chapters 3, 6, 31, 51, 58, 83, and 87—and holding no less another exalted title of Celestial Master (tianshi ). For a brief but illuminating discussion that the person might be the apotheosized Qiu Chuji, see “Quanzhen jiao,” in HFTWJ, 3: 1381–82.

  8. This is likely the apotheosized Ge Hong.

  9. As noted in the introduction, these are the stock metaphors, often in pairs, of internal or physiological alchemy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. The verse here is alluding to the Indra heaven with its thirty-three summits (trayastriṁśās) and to the six heavens of desire (devalokas). The first of these heavens is situated halfway up Mount Sumeru, where Indra is said to rule over his thirty-two devas. For descriptions of the Heavens, see the Dazhidu lun (the śastra ascribed to Nāgārjuna on the greater Prajñā-pāramitā sūtra, translated by Kumārajīva), and Jushe lun (the Abhidharma-kośa śāstra), translated into Chinese by Paramārtha and the historical Xuanzang.

  2. The Star of Long Life in Chinese mythology.

  3. Special judges in the Underworld, traditionally robed in red, blue, and green.

  4. “Jade rabbit, gold crow”: Daoist metaphors for the sun and the moon. The lunar rabbit or hare, according to some scholars, may also have been a myth derived from Indian sources.

  5. In Chinese folklore, the monkey is said to be able to ward off sickness from horses. This title is a pun on the words bi (to avoid, to keep off), ma (horse), and wen (pestilence, plague).

  6. In this poem, which is exceedingly difficult to translate, the author has made use of numerous lists of horses associated with the emperors Zhou Muwang (ca. 1001–942 BCE), Qin Shi Huangdi (221–209 BCE), and Han Wendi (179–157 BCE). To construct the poem, some names are used merely for their tonal effects (e.g., chizhi and yaoniao), while others have ostensible meanings as well. My translation attempts to approximate the original. Those interested in famous and legendary horses in Chinese lore should consult the relevant sections on horses in the TPYL, j 9.

  7. The modern Khokand, where the best horses are said to be raised.

  8. This is the legendary character Zhang Daoling , widely celebrated as the founder of the Daoist religion and also intimately associated with the the Way of the Celestial Masters or Tianshi Dao . See respective entries on Zhang and “Tianshi” in ET 2: 1222–23, 979–81.

  9. Li Jing , the god here, is actually the Indian deity Vaiśravaṇa. For a detailed study of the lineage and pedigree of this deity and his family in Chinese literary and religious history, see Liu Ts’un-yan, “Pishamen tianwang fuzi yu Zhongguo xiaoshuo zhi guanxi ,” in HFTWJ, 2: 1045–94.

  10. The Three Platforms (santai) or terraces are the offices of Daoist Star Spirits (i.e., three pairs of stars in Ursa Major), which are said to correspond to the Three Officials (sangong) in imperial government. See the “Tianwenzhi ,” in Jinshu , j 13; entries “Taiyi” and “Taishang ganying pian” in ET 2: 958 and 949.

  11. This is the Bull Monster King, who will reappear in the Red Boy episode, chapters 40–42, and in the episode of the Mountain of Flames, chapters 59–61.

  12. “Star Spirits of Five Poles”: wudou xingjun , literally, Lords of the Five Dippers, they are Daoist deities.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. The highest gods of the Daoist Pantheon. They are: the Jade-Pure Celestial Worthy of Original Commencement (Yuqing yuanshi tianzun), the Exalted-Pure Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasures (Shangqing lingbao tianzun), and the Primal-Pure Celestial Worthy of the Way and Virtue (Taiqing daode tianzun, also named Taiqing taishang laojun). The last one is the name of the deified Laozi.

  2. “Four Thearchs”: the sidi of early Chinese mythology firmly embraced by later Daoism are divided according to directional orientations and colors—green (east), white (west), red (south), and black (north). The Center’s Yellow Thearch or Yellow Emperor, when added, makes up the Five Thearchs, a group different from legendary figures in documents of history, possibly alluded to in the beginning of chapter 1.

  3. Nine Luminaries: Āditya (the sun), Sōma (the moon), Aṅgāraka (Mars, also in Chinese, the Planet of Fire), Budha (Mercury, the Planet of Water), Bṛhaspati (Jupiter, the Planet of Wood), Sukra (Venus, the Planet of Gold), Śanaiścara (Saturn, the Planet of Earth), Rāhu (the spirit that causes eclipses), and Ketu, a comet.

  4. The Generals of the Five Quarters are the five powerful Bodhisattvas who are guardians of the four quarters and the center. The Constellations or Star Lodges (xu ) are the twenty-eight nakṣatras, divided into four mansions (east-spring, south-summer, west-autumn, and north-winter), each of which has seven members.

  5. These four are the external protectors of Indra, each living on a side of Mount Meru. They defend the world aga
inst the attack of evil spirits or asuras; hence the name of The Four Devarājas, Guardians of the World. They are: Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Upholder of the Kingdom; Virūḍhaka, King of Growth; Virūpākṣa, the Broad-eyed Deva King; and Vaiśravaṇa, the God of Great Learning. Kuvera, the God of Wealth, is also a member of this group.

  6. They are: Zi (Rat, 11:00 p.m.–1:00 a.m.), Chou (Ox, 1:00–3:00 a.m.), Yin (Tiger, 3:00–5:00 a.m.), Mao (Hare, 5:00–7:00 a.m.), Chen (Dragon, 7:00–9:00 a.m.), Si (Serpent, 9:00–11:00 a.m.), Wu (Horse, 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.), Wei (Sheep, 1:00–3:00 p.m.), Shen (Monkey, 3:00–5:00 p.m.), You (Cock, 5:00–7:00 p.m.), Xu (Dog, 7:00–9:00 p.m.), Hai (Boar, 9:00–11:00 p.m.).

  7. Five Elders: these deities of the Daoist Pantheon represent the essences (jing) of the Five Phases.

  8. All of these are deities of the Daoist Pantheon, developed and expanded from the early medieval period down to the time of the Ming. The various deities are a syncretic assembly of those appropriated from Indie Buddhism and of those local and transregional figures in territorial China. Some of those figures antedated the rise of organized Daoism in the second century CE.

  9. This is Xu Sun (trad. 239–374), a figure celebrated in cultic religious lore as healer, exorcist, dragon-slayer, and a highly filial son. His several biographies and portraits are found in the DZ. See entry on name in ET 2: 1124–26.

  10. Sometimes called the Lady Queen Mother (Wangmu niangniang), or the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wangmu), she is the highest goddess of Daoism. Her official residence is the Palace of the Jasper Pool on Mount Kunlun in Tibet. She has been studied extensively in international scholarship. See entry in ET 2: 1119–20 and relevant bibliography.

  11. Five-colored clouds: these clouds are always considered auspicious symbols and symptoms of a hallowed region, inhabited by gods or transcendents.

  12. Naked Feet: A Song book of anecdotes by one Wang Mingqing told the story of how the mother of the crown prince, Zhaoling , was summoned to attend the emperor because she dreamt that an immortal (yushi ) with bare feet revealed to her that he was to be her son. Zhaoling, who later became the Emperor Renzong, was fond of taking off shoes and socks as a boy. Because of Renzong’s known devotion to the Daoist religion, he was later nicknamed the Immortal of Naked Feet, a distinguished honor because the title was also used first to designate Laozi.